Thoughts on politics, law, culture and guns from an eclectic, but mainly center-right point of view

Saturday, September 21, 2013

Centrality

If you put a circle on the globe that includes China, India and Indonesia then you have located where most of the 7 Billion humans live. The minority live spread out over the rest of the planet. Although sub-Saharan Africa and South America have very interesting histories and cultures, most of what's important in the world is in the Northern Hemisphere (read Guns, Germs and Steel to find out why that was historically inevitable).

The cool thing about the Northern Hemisphere is that air routes over the northern polar regions make travel from America to Poland, for example, a matter of a half dozen hours or so, and if you're way up north, like in Edmonton or anywhere in Alaska, the air miles are fewer still.

Diomedes used to kid me about my excitement about Alaska. He said I was like the guy in the James Taylor song Mexico, I really liked the place but I'd never really been. Now I've been.

I only saw Anchorage, Seward, Denali and Fairbanks, but I have to think that those places gave me the general templates--coastal mountains, interior mountains, taiga and tundra. There might be more, but there certainly is a lot of that stuff up there. The cool thing I noted is that Anchorage is closer to Tokyo than it is to New York; Moscow is only 250 miles further from Anchorage than Miami.